March 2020 / Recently, Greg Russ, the chairman of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) indicated that the agency could do the unthinkable and partially privatize the city’s public housing stock as a way to bridge that agency’s ever-widening repair bill. This was brought about by Russ’ revelation that the cost of the repairs over the next five years could be a staggering $40 billion, up...
August 2019 / We all know instinctively that the U.S. is awash in natural gas. What may be surprising is that in some parts of the country, there isn’t even a drop to burn. As an illustration, earlier this year Con Ed and National Grid placed a moratorium on accepting any new natural gas customers in most of Westchester County, Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island. The reason is jammed-up supply...
JUNE-JULY 2019 / The NYC Council recently passed legislation setting new standards for greenhouse gas emission from buildings. The measure aligns with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. The bill would cut pollution from city buildings by 40% over the next 10 years as part of New York’s overall environmental goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% to...
May 2019 / The Arab world is facing its own version of an Iron Curtain, imposed not by external actors but through domestic forces vying for power. — Jamal Khashoggi While America has been a superpower for almost a century, its emergence as a global energy superpower is relatively new. As an illustration, as recently as 2015 it was illegal to export oil. This all changed with the shale boom which...
April 2019 / Ever since a study by the University of Oxford predicted that 47 percent of U.S. jobs are at risk of being replaced by robots and artificial intelligence over the next 15 to 20 years, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the future of work,” wrote Andres Oppenheimer in his novel, “The Robots Are Coming: The Future of Jobs in the Age of Automation.” Sounds all too familiar as we...
Best-selling financial author, Wall Street investment banker, social commentator, award-winning poet, energy consultant, off-Broadway producer, and community organizer in Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign, Ron Spurga is the ultimate Renaissance Man.